Joy Pullmann: Home schooling exaggerated

At a glance

A demographically wide variety of people home-school – these are atheists, Christians and Mormons; conservatives, libertarians and liberals; low, middle and high-income families; black, Hispanic and white; parents with Ph.D.s, GEDs and no high-school diplomas.

Source: National Home Education Research Institute

About the only thing government can't track right now seems to be home-schoolers, despite a recent Internet ricochet of old, inaccurate claims that "home schooling is growing seven times faster than public school enrollment."

The truth is more complicated.

Breitbart.com started it all, linking to an Education News post from May 2012 with the "seven times faster" claim, but neither provides a credible source. They just fling off numbers: "Since 1999, the number of children who are being home-schooled has increased by 75%," Education News breathlessly claims. The numbers these articles give, now quoted across the Internet, do not match the available data.

State and federal governments typically do not track home-school students like they do public and even private school students, making reliable numbers sparse. The most recent federal estimates on home schooling are from 2007. The report just before that was in 2003, showing a 29 percent increase in homeschooled students since 1999. A 2008 Census Bureau report showed home schooling increased 8.3 percent per year from 2004 to 2008. So, for the most recent decade in which we have data, home schooling seems to have been growing between 7 and 8 percent per year.

That means home schooling would approximately double in a decade, which is indeed about what happened between 1999 and 2009. Between 2000 and 2010, the most recent decade of available data, public K-12 enrollment increased 2 percent. So, yes, home schooling has been growing faster than public schooling, but likely two to three times faster, not seven.

Since there are some 2 million home-schooled students and nearly 50 million public schooled students, it takes a lot more public than home-school students to get an equal enrollment increase.

A 1 percent increase in both, for example, would mean 2,000 more home-school students but 50,000 more public school students. So to say home schooling is increasing faster than public schooling exaggerates its growth.

Here's another factor: A 2013 Census Bureau study shows private school enrollment has taken a dive. In 2010, private schools registered their lowest proportion of students in 55 years. The report author considered whether former private-school families were now homeschooling but found the evidence mixed. She found little "strong support for the explanation that a rise in home schooling has affected the decline in private school enrollment." Instead, she thinks most are entering charter schools, a new kind of public school.

This suggests more families are seeking alternatives to traditional public schools, but not all or most are turning to home schooling.

In fact, charter school enrollment has tripled in the past decade, and approximately matches home-school enrollment. Charter schools have grown faster than home schooling, probably because taxpayers pay charter schools' bills. Home-schoolers get no such subsidy.

Researchers have provided more recent and probably better data about such families. Dr. Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute put the 2010 home-schooled population at 2.04 million kids. If that increased 7 percent each year until now, there are 2.5 million home-schoolers today.

These numbers depict strong homeschooling growth, although not at the eye-popping numbers people have been tweeting. They also indicate private schools have lost the most. People who home-school tend to stick to it despite paying taxes plus tuition for school, while many private school parents will not.

Given the strong academic and social skills of the average home-schooler, an increase in their number benefits society. The growth of home schooling, however, is no excuse for policymakers to ignore the other 95 percent. The need for reforms such as vouchers, charters and education saving accounts remains urgent.

Joy Pullmann, a home-school graduate, is managing editor of School Reform News and an education research fellow for The Heartland Institute.

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